“I don't think I have an obsession, however I do eat chocolate every day.”
“You don't become a chef to become famous.”
“It's a very naive idea to think that the chef is cooking everything, and, on top of it, is irreplaceable. That would mean that basically he is the only genius, and there are idiots all around him, which doesn't make sense.”
“When I am about to have a difficult project, I dream I am climbing a mountain. When everything is going fine, I dream I am going down the mountain.”
“Having sharp, great knives will enable you to cook very precisely. Knife skills are essential in cooking.”
“Money is not necessarily, although it helps a lot for happiness, it's not necessarily the best way to be happy, to be rich, you know.”
“The Cheesecake Factory's not that bad.”
“If you can't think like an onion or a carrot or a tomato, you may be a technician, but you won't understand what you're doing, and your dish will be flat.”
“A lot of foreign people say, when asking about eating habits, 'What is your guilty pleasure?' I have no guilt. Whatever I do, I enjoy and it's the point. I think if you start to feel guilty about it, that's a problem. So, no guilty pleasures. I have pleasure and no guilt at all.”
“Everybody wants to support his own region and economy and farming. If we can preserve the land and if we can preserve the ocean, we all know, deep inside that we're doing the right thing.”